Personal Vehicles Preferred by Urban Americans: Household Automobile Holdings and New Car Purchases Projected to the Year 2000

摘要

A procedure is described for modeling the choices made in urban American households among personal vehicles on the bases of cost, passenger capacity, and engine technology, and it projects those preferences to the year 1990 and 2000. The results of this disaggregate technique are used by the other predictive research tasks undertaken by Argonne National Laboratory in a project entitled Technology Assessment of Productive Conservation in Urban Transportation (TAPCUT). The vehicle preferences reported here furnish data for the overall TAPCUT objective of forecasting the probable effects of energy conservation policies in transportation. In our projections, vehicles with standard spark-ignition (Otto-cycle) engines continue to dominate automobile holdings and new car purchases in either of two socioeconomic scenarios under any of three settings (an existing policy set and two alternative conservation strategies). From 1990, small cars (seating four or fewer passengers) dominate urban holdings and sales in two of the three TAPCUT energy strategies - the exception being the strategy that emphasizes individual travel - and this holds true with only a minor variation for both socioeconomic scenarios (an optimistic one and a slightly pessimistic one). Advanced-technology vehicles are most successful under the Individual Travel Strategy. It appears that vehicle charateristics are far more significant than demographic descriptors in estimating household vehicle choice using this modeling approach. (ERA citation 07:044013)